Pay and Play

Theresa Rebeck and Horton Foote on the perils of ownership.

Alison Pill and Katie Finneran as battling siblings in “Mauritius.”Credit ROBERT RISKO

Theresa Rebeck is a slick playwright; in fact, she’s so slick that Gucci wears her shoes. Her scenes have a crisp shape, her dialogue pops, her characters swagger through an array of showy emotion, and she knows how to give a plot a cunning twist. Rebeck’s latest play, “Mauritius” (directed by Doug Hughes, at the Biltmore), brings together two sensational forms of combat: the psychological battle between rivalrous siblings for property after a parent’s death, which most of the audience understands, and the compulsive battle for ownership in the world of philately, which most of the audience doesn’t. (The title of the play refers to “the holy grail of philately,” a couple of uncancelled, misprinted African stamps.) When the play opens, Jackie (the excellent Alison Pill) is in possession of a stamp collection that her late mother gave her as a reward for her loyal care during a long struggle with cancer. Jackie is ignorant about stamps, but she’s smart enough to know that life has dealt her a low hand and she wants to sell the stamps in order to better her own existence. All that stands between Jackie and a very big payday, we soon learn, is the question of whether or not the stamps are real. But what eventually becomes clear, in the course of this crowd-pleasing evening, is that the only fake here is the play.

“Mauritius” is, in essence, David Mamet for girls. In Mamet’s “American Buffalo,” a group of bumblers contrive to steal a rare nickel from a man who paid ninety dollars for it at a junk shop. With their idiom—a combination of ignorance and extravagance that emulates the badinage of big business—the lowlifes become a satire on the spiritual attrition of capitalism. “You know what is free enterprise,” one of them says. “The freedom . . . of the Individual . . . to Embark on any Fucking Course that he sees fit . . . in order to secure his honest chance to make a profit.” In “Mauritius,” Rebeck channels Mamet’s rhythms and his comic tropes of linguistic self-inflation. Dennis (Bobby Cannavale), the amateur collector who first spots the stamps in Jackie’s collection, tries to leverage his discovery with a wealthy collector, the tritely named Sterling (F. Murray Abraham). “Fuck you, you little piece of shit,” the barbarous Sterling replies to Dennis, who contends that a valise of Sterling’s cash will be sufficient to bilk Jackie out of her stamps, which have an estimated value of six million dollars. “You bring me this fucking preposterous story about some girl with a— Fuck you. Fuck you. Life is short, my friend, and it’s getting shorter, you bring stories like this to the table.” He goes on, “You ask yourself what do you want out of life? I advise you. At moments like this, you are stepping out over the abyss, for what?” When Sterling appears later, lugging an aluminum case bursting with spondulics, he weaves another web of Mamet-like flimflammery: “It is cash, it is under the table, there’s no overhead, there’s no lawyers, there’s no fucking accountants here, to drive you and me fucking crazy with their nonsense. That’s added value.”

Rebeck mines a lot of amusement out of the permutations of the business deal. When Dennis finally gets all the parties around the table, the pragmatic Jackie demands cash just to show Sterling the stamps. Sterling balks. Dennis prevails upon him to ante up. “When the river stops flowing, all the fish die,” he says. But, where Mamet’s play was an act of penetration, Rebeck’s is an act of prestidigitation, a confidence trick. In this ersatz but entertaining sleight of hand, it’s the audience that gets robbed—of the revelations of character and of feeling that a play should provide.

From its first beat, “Mauritius” seems to me psychologically bogus. Clutching the album, Jackie stands just inside the threshold of a stamp shop, trying and failing to get the attention of the persnickety owner, Philip (the deft Dylan Baker), who sits reading a book about twenty feet away. She launches into an expository monologue that lasts more than a minute. Reader, when was the last time you spoke to someone at length across an empty room without making eye contact? Jackie may be fragile and lost but she’s not insane. The moment looks dramatic, but as staged it’s untrue. So, too, is the rift between Jackie and her better-educated, older half sister, Mary (Katie Finneran), who claims the stamp collection as part of her emotional inheritance. Their mother has left no will, so it comes down to Mary’s sentimental claim and Jackie’s pragmatic one. Jackie sees the stamps as payment for the servitude of her youth, for the sacrifice that she made, and that Mary wouldn’t or couldn’t make. “She asked you to come, she begged you, and you stayed away. That was your choice,” Jackie says, with justifiable bitterness. But what was the issue between Mary and her mother? How was the mother difficult? Why has Mary apparently had so many more advantages in life than Jackie? Who are these people? The question extends to the secondary characters as well. What is the source of Sterling’s almost Jacobean greed? Of his wealth? Why does Philip hold a grudge against Sterling? Rebeck gives her characters arresting behavior without exploring it. Personality, in other words, is conferred in the service of plot, not truth. For all its shiny surface, “Mauritius” follows the old boulevard recipe of complication without depth.

It says something about the appeal of Alison Pill—an actress with a big future—that her compelling combination of ferocity and fragility carries the audience beyond the inconsistencies of the story. Toward the end of the play, Jackie seems to capitulate to Mary. “I just wanted something, for once, just something,” she says, like a tire deflating, handing over the stamp album. She adds, “You couldn’t let me have anything? Not anything?” Jackie has thrown a knockout punch, stood up to con men, survived strangulation, and now, at the eleventh hour, appears to cave to a sister she claims to hate. The happy reversal of fortune that follows may make commercial sense but it makes no emotional sense. As Mamet might say, “Don’t piss on my shoes and tell me it’s raining.”

Where Rebeck’s tale of a troubled legacy leaves nothing to the imagination, Horton Foote allows the family dispute at the center of his new play, “Dividing the Estate” (fluently directed by Michael Wilson, at 59E59), to unfold calmly in a fully thought-out, emotionally consistent, and compassionate universe. In the parlous economic climate of Texas in the late nineteen-eighties, amid failing banks and falling oil prices, the Gordon family is land rich and cash poor. The imperious family matriarch, Stella (the pitch-perfect Elizabeth Ashley), staunchly refuses to split up the property. “I’m never in this world going to divide it,” she growls in response to pressure from her daughter Mary Jo (the expert Hallie Foote, the playwright’s daughter), who wants her inheritance now. Greed contends with family loyalty, and, in this financial pinch, self-interest is rationalized as tax savings. In his portrayal of the desperation of the affluent unmoored by seismic economic and cultural shifts, the ninety-one-year-old playwright—whose dramatic expertise has earned him a Pulitzer Prize and two Academy Awards (“To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Tender Mercies”)—has the confidence to trust his characters and the wisdom to follow them. He lets their pathos build by slow degrees. When the trembling, aged retainer Doug (Arthur French) insists on serving dinner to the fractious family and then spills the biscuits, the moment plays like tragedy.

“Dividing the Estate” brings news of the manners and mores of the Southwest. Foote can nail the reality of place with a simple detail: paper flowers in a mason jar at a black cemetery. He captures in the Southern twang both the music and the mendacity of personality. Mary Jo’s nasal, high-pitched fussing and fuming undermine her patina of politeness. Angling for every advantage, Mary Jo, as Hallie Foote plays her, is a wry star turn, at once ugly and hilarious. After Stella dies and Mary Jo’s hopes of a windfall collapse, she offers up what Dr. Johnson called “the secret ambush of a specious prayer.” “I know what I’m praying for, every night down on my knees,” she says. “That we strike oil.” ♦

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